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Way back in 1587, the feudal overlord decided to give a party to celebrate the completion of his new castle. The drunken guests began to dance their way to the castle. Once they had recovered from their hangovers, it was decided to make it an annual event and call it The Dance of the Fools, or Awa Odori
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KOENJI AWA ODORI 2026
AWA ODORI (The Dance of the Fools)
the SQUARE
© ajpscs
ajpscs posted a photo:
Way back in 1587, the feudal overlord decided to give a party to celebrate the completion of his new castle. The drunken guests began to dance their way to the castle. Once they had recovered from their hangovers, it was decided to make it an annual event and call it The Dance of the Fools, or Awa Odori
YouTube
KOENJI AWA ODORI 2026
AWA ODORI (The Dance of the Fools)
the SQUARE
© ajpscs
Relatives try to piece together information found online and from Nepal as Tibet advocates groups say information is suppressed in China
Fan Hong last heard from her husband on the morning of the Nepal-Tibet disaster. More than a week later, the 31-year-old is desperately searching for information about Lin Bo, who was working on a Chinese highway project in Tibet. Struggling to get information from authorities, Fan turned to social media for help.
“My husband works on a project in Nepal, about 5 kilometres from the Gyirong border crossing. I want to know what the situation is, but I haven’t been able to reach him,” the 31-year-old from China’s Sichuan province wrote on Rednote.
Continue reading...Togo-sponsored resolution calls to phase out traditional map that depicts continent as similar size to Greenland
The UN general assembly will vote on Friday on a resolution for the world to formally phase out the traditional Mercator map of the globe in favour of one that more accurately displays Africa’s size.
Robert Dussey, Togo’s foreign affairs minister, said the resolution was sponsored by Togo and backed by countries including the African Union’s 54 other member states. He did not specify the total number.
Continue reading...Negotiators to visit Kyiv and Moscow as US president Donald Trump says he wants to see an end to the war. What we know on day 1,654
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that US negotiators will soon visit Moscow and Kyiv to resume efforts to end the Russian invasion. The Ukrainian president said in his nightly video address that preliminary dates had been set for the visit. “We expect to see representatives of the US president here in Kyiv,” Zelenskyy said. “There will be a meeting with them in Moscow and in Kyiv. We are expecting a meeting with them in the coming days. It is very important. It is important that America continues to be active.”
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin said on Thursday there was a chance of reaching an agreement to end the war in Ukraine. Speaking at an economic forum, Russia’s president said a number of countries including the US and China were ready to support a peace settlement. “Ultimately, however, the problem must be resolved by the countries involved in the conflict – Russia and Ukraine,” he said. “We are grateful to everyone attempting to contribute to a settlement. Is there a chance? In my view, yes, there is.”
In Washington, Donald Trump said he wanted to see an end to the war and losses sustained by both sides. “I just want to see that end. I think we’ll get it,” the US president told GB News in an interview that aired on Thursday, a day after telling reporters he wanted a summit with Putin when the Kremlin leader is ready for a peace deal. They last met for US-mediated talks in February.
Trump has said he would ask European nations to pay back the US for military aid and munitions previously sent to Ukraine amid the ongoing war with Russia and appeared to signal a halt in sales to allied nations. In a social media post, Trump on Thursday also slammed reports of heavily depleted US munition stockpiles amid the separate war in Iran, while adding that the US was ramping up production and stockpiling munitions. “We are taking them for ourselves, the U.S.A., rather than selling them to others, but the sales to Allies will soon again, begin,” Trump wrote.
A Ukrainian strike on Thursday killed four people, including two medical personnel, in an attack on Russia’s border region of Belgorod, officials said. The region’s official headquarters said the dead in Shebekino, just across the border from Ukraine, included a doctor, medic and married couple. Three people were injured. Meanwhile, the head of Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Region said three civilians died in drone strikes in three separate districts of the region.
Russian drones struck and damaged a Coca-Cola plant outside the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Thursday, Zelenskyy said. Officials said there were no injuries in the strike near the town of Brovary, east of the capital. “Today, the Russians have hit a Coca-Cola plant with their drone. Coca-Cola is such an enemy that they set it on fire with their Shaheds,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, referring to Iranian-designed drones. “It’s a clear Russian signal to America. The Russians cannot be unaware that this is an American facility.”
A Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Thursday injured 10 people, triggered a fire and badly damaged a high-rise residential building, officials said. The city’s military administration initially said one person had died in the latest assault, but later said the report had proved untrue. It said 10 people, including a child, had been hurt. The capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said nine people were injured, including six medical personnel.
Zelenskyy said on Thursday that an investigation would determine what caused a dispute between two of Ukraine’s security agencies to escalate into a shootout in Kyiv this week that left three members of the defence ministry’s HUR military intelligence directorate injured. The dispute centres on the disappearance for nine days of a Russian nationalist activist fighting alongside Ukrainian troops.
Russia will close German cultural centres on its territory, its foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said Thursday in a retaliatory measure reflecting the deepening tensions between Moscow and European countries that are helping Ukraine resist the Kremlin’s invasion. Lavrov’s announcement came after Berlin blamed Moscow for an attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport on 4 August.
Continue reading...NEW YORK (ANP) - Tennisser Jesper de Jong is er niet in geslaagd de derde ronde van de US Open te bereiken. De 26-jarige Nederlander moest in New York zijn meerdere erkennen in de Belg Zizou Bergs. Het werd 5-7 6-1 2-6 6-7 (2).
Het was voor De Jong, die op de wereldranglijst op de honderdste plaats staat, de eerste keer dat hij op de US Open in de tweede ronde stond. In de eerste ronde had hij gewonnen van de Italiaan Francesco Passaro.
NEW YORK (ANP) - Tennisser Botic van de Zandschulp heeft op de US Open voor een grote verrassing gezorgd door de als zesde geplaatste Australiër Alex de Minaur uit te schakelen. De 30-jarige Nederlander won de partij in de tweede ronde in New York in drie sets: 6-4 7-5 6-2.
Van de Zandschulp, de nummer 70 van de wereld, won in de eerste ronde van de Brit Jan Choinski. In 2021 haalde Van de Zandschulp de kwartfinales van de US Open, zijn beste prestatie in New York tot op heden. De Minaur is de nummer 7 van de wereldranglijst. De 27-jarige Australiër bereikte de afgelopen twee jaar de kwartfinales in New York en had de vier eerdere ontmoetingen met Van de Zandschulp gewonnen.
In de derde ronde neemt Van de Zandschulp het op tegen de winnaar van de partij tussen de Belg Zizou Bergs en zijn landgenoot Jesper de Jong.
WASHINGTON (ANP) - De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft Adam Telle benoemd tot de nieuwe minister van het Leger. Dat meldt Trump op Truth Social.
Trump noemt Telle "een groot patriot die door iedereen wordt gewaardeerd". Telle volgt daarmee Dan Driscoll op die maandag zijn ontslag had ingediend na maanden van spanningen met minister van Defensie Pete Hegseth. Driscolls besluit volgde op een reeks wijzigingen in de legerleiding en ontslagen binnen de krijgsmacht.
Het Witte Huis ging afgelopen week niet inhoudelijk in op Driscolls beweegredenen om op te stappen als "Army Secretary".
Telles voorganger Driscoll verwierf met name bekendheid toen hij door Trump werd aangewezen om deel te nemen aan gesprekken met Moskou en Kyiv over het beëindigen van de oorlog in Oekraïne. Dat werd destijds gezien als een ongebruikelijke taak voor een minister van het Leger.
Cisco has warned its customers of three critical-rated flaws in its products. Two of them are present in the Cisco IOS XR operating system that powers the company’s carrier-grade kit. CVE-2026-20274 scores 9.8 on the ten-point CVSS scale and covers a buffet of buffering issues, the potential for out-of-bounds writes, and the chance to initialize resources with an insecure default. CVE-2026-20279 is another 9.8-rated flaw. Cisco says it’s an improper access control problem that covers “improper certificate validation, missing authentication for critical function, missing authorization, and incorrect authorization.” Cisco also spotted a trio of 8.8-rated flaws, plus another rated 8.6 and one more scored at 8.2 The company’s advisory says the company found the flaws after “a comprehensive internal security review,” language that perhaps hints at Cisco dabbling with Mythos and/or other bug-finding models. The fix is in: Cisco has published new versions of IOS XR that fix the problems and “strongly recommends” customers adopt them. Cisco’s support organization spotted the third critical flaw it revealed on Wednesday. CVE-2026-20212 is a tad embarrassing because the cause is a bad integration with Cisco’s own Silicon One networking processors that means some Nexus 9000 Series Switches “could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute code with root privileges.” “This vulnerability exists because TCP ports 43210 and 43211 are accessible in the default Layer 3 (L3) virtual routing and forwarding (VRF),” according to Cisco’s advisory. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to connect to an affected device and send crafted input that could be executed as code with root privileges. The exploitation of this vulnerability could also cause the S1HAL process to crash, which could cause the device to reload.” Ten Nexus 9000 devices have the problem, which Cisco suggests owners mitigate by using infrastructure access control lists (iACLs) to allow only required management and control plane traffic that is destined to the affected device. “Alternatively, the iACLs may be used to explicitly deny all TCP packets that are destined to a locally configured IP address with a destination port of 43210 or 43211,” the company advises. The networking giant suggests that approach because it hasn’t yet created a software update to fix the flaw once and for all. The company has, however, delivered a download that helps to implement the mitigation. Cisco hasn't seen attacks on these flaws. That may change, fast, now that evildoers can use AI to whip up nastyware. ®
ajpscs has added a photo to the pool:
Way back in 1587, the feudal overlord decided to give a party to celebrate the completion of his new castle. The drunken guests began to dance their way to the castle. Once they had recovered from their hangovers, it was decided to make it an annual event and call it The Dance of the Fools, or Awa Odori
YouTube
KOENJI AWA ODORI 2026
AWA ODORI (The Dance of the Fools)
the SQUARE
© ajpscs
ajpscs has added a photo to the pool:
Way back in 1587, the feudal overlord decided to give a party to celebrate the completion of his new castle. The drunken guests began to dance their way to the castle. Once they had recovered from their hangovers, it was decided to make it an annual event and call it The Dance of the Fools, or Awa Odori
YouTube
KOENJI AWA ODORI 2026
AWA ODORI (The Dance of the Fools)
the SQUARE
© ajpscs
:format(webp)/s3/static.nrc.nl/images/gn4/stripped/data152986730-ed89e9.jpg)
Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli told Gazetteer in an email that the company pays parking tickets "like any other driver". [...]
The SFMTA data between January 2025 and July 2026 shows that the most common infraction for Waymos in the city, with 2,038 tickets, was "parking in stands," aka taking up a space intended for a specific type of vehicle such as a tour bus. The other top infractions were parking in a prohibited space, obstructing traffic, double parking, and blocking bike lanes.
The single most frequent location for a parking ticket was 85 North Point St. -- a block away from Pier 39 at Fisherman's Wharf -- where Waymos were cited 577 times. Coincidentally, the second-most common address (with 369 citations) was just two blocks away at 150 Beach St., outside a parking garage. Waymos also got hit with 288 tickets on Drumm Street, a 1,300-foot stretch in the Financial District adjacent to Embarcadero Plaza. [...]
"The amount of money for a ticket is nothing to Waymo. So jumping through the hoops to assess a fine will not change their behavior," Koopman told Gazetteer.
In theory, the state now has more power to regulate Waymo's driving, thanks to new regulations adopted on July 1 that allow California law enforcement officials to issue "notices of noncompliance" to robotaxi companies for moving violations; previously, only parking enforcement was allowed.
The infractions will be tracked by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, and the state has the right to suspend or revoke a company's driverless car permit if there are repeated or serious noncompliance problems. Unlike human drivers, Waymo does not have to pay fines for moving violations, Koopman said.
"I have a hard time believing any plausible number of notices of non-compliance are going to cause Waymo's permit to be revoked," Koopman said. "It's a step in the right direction, but I don't think this step does very much on a practical basis."
I was gonna make a joke about how many parking tickets you thought a regular meatsack Non-Corporate person could get and still keep their license, but it turns out that the answer is infinitely many as long as you pay them.
It used to be that if you got too many unpaid parking tickets you could have your license suspended, but even that's not the case any more since 2017. (And with a good motivation: that it primarily harmed the poor. But to the rich, and to corporations, a fine is a price.)
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously. 
In 2001, Andie and Mike connected a camera and a bubble machine to the internet, allowing strangers from all over to the world to blow bubbles in their Florida backyard and watch the results. 25 years later, the Bubblecam is still up and running.
ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini all suffered significant service disruptions within roughly the same few-hour window Thursday morning. OpenAI and Anthropic reported elevated errors and later restored service, while Grok remained impaired and third-party monitoring indicated a likely Gemini outage despite no public acknowledgment from Google. Ars Technica reports: Other major Internet services, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare, have not reported any major issues as of press time Thursday, though issue reports on DownDetector did spike somewhat for all three this morning.
While the affected frontier models go down occasionally, having all four experience interruptions in the same short period is practically unheard of. Claude reports 99.4 percent uptime for its services over the last 90 days and last reported a similar three-hour "partial outage" on August 24. OpenAI reports 99.63 percent uptime for ChatGPT and 100 percent uptime for ChatGPT Codex in the same period. ChatGPT's so-called "Work Mode" reported an hours-long period of "elevated latency" on August 31.
While the affected frontier models go down occasionally, having all four experience interruptions in the same short period is practically unheard of. Claude reports 99.4 percent uptime for its services over the last 90 days and last reported a similar three-hour "partial outage" on August 24. OpenAI reports 99.63 percent uptime for ChatGPT and 100 percent uptime for ChatGPT Codex in the same period. ChatGPT's so-called "Work Mode" reported an hours-long period of "elevated latency" on August 31.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.